For ourselves, we faithfully assure you, that we have ever considered you as rational creatures, as free agents, as men willing to pursue and able to discern your own true interest.  We have wished to continue united with you, in order that a people of one origin and one character should be directed to the rational objects of government by joint counsels, and protected in them by a common force.  Other subordination in you we require none.  We have never pressed that argument of general union to the extinction of your local, natural, and just privileges.  Sensible of what is due both to the dignity and weakness of man, we have never wished to place over you any government, over which, in great, fundamental points, you should have no sort of check or control in your own hands, or which should be repugnant to your situation, principles, and character.

No circumstances of fortune, you may be assured, will ever induce us to form or tolerate any such design.  If the disposition of Providence (which we deprecate) should even prostrate you at our feet, broken in power and in spirit, it would be our duty and inclination to revive, by every practicable means, that free energy of mind which a fortune unsuitable to your virtue had damped and dejected, and to put you voluntarily in possession of those very privileges which you had in vain attempted to assert by arms.  For we solemnly declare, that, although we should look upon a separation from you as an heavy calamity, (and the heavier, because we know you must have your full share in it,) yet we had much rather see you totally independent of this crown and kingdom than joined to it by so unnatural a conjunction as that of freedom with servitude,—­a conjunction which, if it were at all practicable, could not fail, in the end, of being more mischievous to the peace, prosperity, greatness, and power of this nation than beneficial by any enlargement of the bounds of nominal empire.

But because, brethren, these professions are general, and such as even enemies may make, when they reserve to themselves the construction of what servitude and what liberty are, we inform you that we adopt your own standard of the blessing of free government.  We are of opinion that you ought to enjoy the sole and exclusive right of freely granting, and applying to the support of your administration, what God has freely granted as a reward to your industry.  And we do not confine this immunity from exterior coercion, in this great point, solely to what regards your local establishment, but also to what may be thought proper for the maintenance of the whole empire.  In this resource we cheerfully trust and acquiesce, satisfied by evident reason that no other expectation of revenue can possibly be given by freemen, and knowing from an experience uniform both on yours and on our side of the ocean that such an expectation has never yet been disappointed.  We know of no road to your coffers but through your affections.